Touch the Screen  

          Dave Matthews Band - Everyday

This long-awaited CD finds the Dave Matthews Band cutting through the underbrush of some previously uncharted territory, rocking harder and emphasizing songcraft over musical virtuosity. Producer Glen Ballard (who contributed to the songwriting as well) probably had some impact, as did guest guitarist Carlos Santana, but what's most evident is Matthews's own will to evolve. As long as he keeps zigging when folks expect him to zag, he's guaranteed a spot in rock's pantheon.

                    Marcy Playground - Shapeshifter

Hits

           Joni Mitchell - Taming the Tiger

Bob Marley - Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and The Wailers           
           

International

          Madredeus O Espirito Da Paz

"...Madredeus has taken Europe by quiet storm....Teresa Salguero's gossamer vocals imbue the poetic lyrics with the melancholy nostalgia that the Portuguese call saudade." (Down Beat 5/96)

Jazz

  Wynton Marsalis -Blood on the Fields

The best big band jazz since Ellington. This is a fantastic album that I seem incapable of growing tired of. Marsalis' best work to date.

          
            Thelonious Monk - Epistrophy, Vol. 2

 

   Charles Mingus - Ah Uhm
Bassist Charles Mingus was one of the great figures in modern jazz. Raised in Los Angeles, he was a devotee of Duke Ellington, whose compositional style had an unsurpassed effect on the young composer. As a player, however, Mingus was drawn to his contemporaries, who included Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach (Roach and Mingus co-owned their own Debut Records during the '50s). Perhaps his greatest contribution was bridging the gap between those two generations: in Mingus's music, one could always explicitly hear the continuity between the big bands and the bebop era, the affinity between the romantic and the modern. Mingus Ah Um is the best introduction to his work as a soloist and composer ("Better Git It in Your Soul", "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat", "Fables of Faubus", "Self-Portrait in Three Colors"...)

 
             Charles Mingus - Pithecanthropus Erectus 1955-57

 

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Bestsellers

            A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

A great portrait of the American scene from the author of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Jonathan Kellerman - Monster

In Jonathan Kellerman's riveting and ingenious new novel, Monster, consulting psychologist Alex Delaware faces one of the most grisly and baffling mysteries of his career: How can a nonfunctional psychotic locked up in a supposedly secure institution for homicidal madmen predict brutal murders in the outside world? Delaware and his friend and partner Detective Milo Sturgis must penetrate this enigma in order to stop the horrific killings.

Perry Brass - Mirage

A blend of scifi and erotic fantasy.
Mirage begins and ends on Ki, a planet with two distinct, rival populations kept from going for each other's throats by the administrations of a moon-worshipping matriarcy of priestesses: one group, known as Same-Sexers, consists of male couples, hunters who live in the forest; the other is called Off-Sexers...
Greeland and Enkidu are promised to each other in an intergenerational match making that shows up the flaws in that kind of system. Enkidu has really little to say in the arrangement... This erotic, humorous novel combines science fiction, gay reality, an archeological mystery, and male eroticism in one neat package.

 

          Richard Stark aka Donald E. Westlake - Man With the Getaway Face

Donald E. Westlake has many names and sometimes seems to be everywhere all at once. In the field of crime literature, Westlake has few peers, a legion of admirers, and innumerable imitators. Since the 1960 publication of his smash debut The Mercenaries, he's written more than 70 novels (40-something under his own name and dozens more under a gaggle of pseudonyms), including two of the best crime fiction series ever written, and dozens of one-shot genre-twisting classics.

         Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Lethem's delirious yarn about crime, pursuit, and punishment, is narrated in a unique voice by its embattled protagonist, Brooklynite (and orphan) Lionel Essrog, aka "Freakshow.''   In portraying a would-be detective with Tourettes syndrome, Jonathan Lethem has created a whole new rhythm and syncopation to his prose, a truly brilliant way to write a novel that comes from the viewpoint of man who cannot be still. If you have ever wondered how a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel would read if Haruki Murakami did the editing, then you really need this book.

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Best authors of the 20th Century

A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Beloved.
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as "Beloved".                       

HENRY MILLER: Plexus

Henry Miller was a catalyst for monumental change in America, leading his audience in challenging the social mores. Several years prior to the "Beats," Miller, raised in Brooklyn, was already producing provocative and shockingly sensual imagery, although it would not be published in the United States until 1961.

Plexus (the second volume of his trilogy "The Rosy Crucifixion") first appeared in French in 1952.

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Top Non-Fiction

  Classic Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

               Listening to Mozart by Charles Wyatt (John Simmons Short Fiction Award)

             Mind over Matter: The Images of Pink Floyd

   Hand of God: The Life of Diego MARADONA by Jimmy Burns
A two faced God and how he influenced the Argentinian culture. The incredible story of a poor young guy who became a multi-millionair acquiring a strange and sad personality.  

 

  David McCullough - Path Between the Seas : the Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914  

Movies

           Murder in a Small Town                    VHS

 

Starring: Gene Wilder
Director: Joyce Chopra

 

                          NTSC format
                          Color, NTSC

This show is good, clean, murderous fun. Gene Wilder cowrote and stars as Cash Carter, a former Broadway theatrical director since retired from the Great White Way and now running a community theater in picturesque Stamford, Connecticut, in this engaging period mystery. The year is 1938...

One of the most spectacular and exhilarating sci-fi/action movies of the 1990s. Dynamite!

franc'O'brain & Transputer Qasar. 2002.
Email: francobrain@angelfire.com.
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